1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device, a method, and a computer-readable recording medium for notifying a user that an object of interest appears on a scene when watching a television program or any other video contents, thereby realizing an effective viewing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, television programs often make announcements such as “X appears soon” and “Y comes on right after this” to give the viewers advance notice regarding the appearance of an object of interest. Such announcements are made in an effort to keep the viewers stay with the program without changing the channel. Even after the announcements, it usually takes a while for the objects X and Y to actually appear onto the scene. For this reason, the viewers may have to watch the television by (1) being forced to stay with unwanted scenes although the desired scene could be very short; (2) changing the channel to view another program while frequently checking the previous channel; or (3) recording the program and viewing it later.
Operations (1) and (2) waste time and give the user labor of checking. As for operation (2), if the user likes the program on the channel that has been changed to, the user may miss the scene of the desired object on the previous channel. In operation (3), the user can view the program later, which minimizes the risk of missing the desired scene. However, if the user wants to watch, for example, a quiz show in ease, a recording operation may give the user a burden. Furthermore, the user may not want to record live broadcasting of a sport game or the like but simply want to obtain in-progress game reports. With the conventional technologies, the efficiency of television viewing may be reduced.
Some technologies (for example, JP-A 2005-323090 (KOKAI)) suggest methods of detecting and notifying the viewer of a desired scene so that the viewer can view the scene without missing. According to the method offered by JP-A 2005-323090 (KOKAI), scene specifying keywords entered by the viewer are compared with broadcast data (transport stream) in which scene information that identifies a scene is superimposed on each scene of a program to detect a desired scene in the program.
The method of JP-A 2005-323090 (KOKAI), however, is predicated on the scene information that is superimposed on the broadcast data. This means that scene information needs to be added to every scene of every program of every broadcast station to realize the notification of any desired scene for any program of any station, which is very difficult. In place of scene information that identifies scenes, subtitles may be incorporated. However, subtitle information may not always accurately identify scenes. Even when a keyword that indicates the object of the viewer's interest appears in the subtitles, it may take a while for the object corresponding to the keyword to actually appear onto the scene, as previously mentioned. Therefore, in the conventional technologies, there is a possibility of notifying the viewer of a wrong scene as the one in which the object of interest actually appears when the object has not yet appeared.